VIA Cyrix III (Samuel) processors

Introduction: February 2000

Overview

The VIA Cyrix III/C3 was a family of x86 central processing units for Socket 370 personal computers, designed by Centaur Technology and sold by VIA Technologies. The different CPU cores were built following the design methodology of Centaur Technology.

The VIA Cyrix III was later renamed VIA C3, as it was not built upon Cyrix technology at all.

The Samuel core

Because the Joshua core was such a mixed result in thermal output, core size, and performance, VIA switched almost immediately to an 11 million transistor Samuel core designed by Centaur Technology. The Samuel core was a simpler RISC design, being an evolution of the WinChip processors (the unreleased WinChip 4). Samuel was designed for higher clock speeds, with more L1 cache (but no L2), and used smaller manufacturing technology. While this version of Cyrix III still had sub-par performance compared to the competition from Intel and AMD, it was quite power efficient and consisted of only half the number of transistors of Cyrix's creation.

VIA dropped the criticized PR rating with new processors based on the Samuel core, in favor of simply distinguishing them by their actual clock speed.